Hungry Filmmakers Festival

I'm super stoked about the Hungry Filmmakers Festival happening in New York City on December 17th! (For more information and to get tickets, go to "Not Eating Out in New York," (A blog I secretly admire from time to time.) I've got my Mega Bus ticket to get me there and my Brown Paper Ticket to get me in the door. It's events like these that revitalize me and remind me why caring about food is so important. (Okay, well events like these, and eating at least three times a day.)

I am thrilled to see the artistic perspective of these young filmmakers as they bring to life the issues that I live and breath daily at the Friedman School. In particular, I am excited to see Severine von Tscharner Fleming's film "The Greenhorns," which I learned about last fall at Terra Madre. Curtis Ellis & Ian Cheney, the producer of King Corn, will show excerpts from their two new pieces of work which I expect will be nothing short of awesome. And as usual, I imagine I will uncover new gems and learn new things about food, culture, and the environment.

(Photo by Maro del Grande, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/06/12/1149964455030.html)

Discovering the Food Tradition of the Northeast

“Cuthbert, Fisher, Flagg, Harrison, Marfax, Marlboro, Marshal, McLellen, Rolfe, Shaffer, Souhegan…” This list of names sounds like the roll call at a New England town meeting. Actually these are the names of some traditional fruit and vegetable varieties formerly grown in the Northeast. Do you ever wonder what people ate before food shipping and freezing technologies were developed? What are the traditional foods of this region? I can tell you, it is difficult to pick them out of the displays of oranges, strawberries, lettuce, and tomatoes at your local grocery store in December.

Consumer demand is one of the key forces that determines what farmers grow and hence what foods we see in grocery stores, farmers markets, and restaurants. One umbrella group actively working on this issue is Renewing America’s Food Traditions (which has the aptly designed acronym: RAFT). RAFT brings together non-profit organizations, seed companies, researchers, and farmers to revive regional varieties and build consumer demand. Member organizations include: Slow Food USA, the American Livestock Breeds Association, Chef’s Collaborative, the Cultural Conservancy, Seed Savers, and Native Seeds/SEARCH.

With the rapid industrialization of the food system post-World War II, food has become more processed and homogeneous. TV Dinners, non-dairy creamer, cake mix, Cheeze Whiz, and Rice-A-Roni started to appear on the shelves of American kitchens in the 1950’s; easing the burden of shopping and cooking for families. Why buy cream weekly for your coffee when you can “enjoy” non-dairy creamer in your cup of joe?

With improvements in “convenience” foods, traditional (also known as heirloom) foods slowly started losing their share in the market place. This is unfortunately because traditional varieties were adapted to the specific ecology of a region and many traditional varieties were selected for cultivation based on their taste, mouth-feel, and adaptability to regional climates. These characteristics, selected through traditional breeding methods, provide heirloom foods with a “taste of place” or terroir.

In the industrialized food system, foods are selected for different characteristics, such as uniformity of appearance and transportability. A side of instant mashed potatoes anyone? Rather than promoting the distinct flavors of a region, food produced for the industrial food system in one part of the country is intended to be indistinguishable from that grown in another region. A Gala apple grown in Washington-state, tastes, looks, and smells the same as a Gala grown in China or New York state.

It is the transformation from small, regional food production to large, specialized national and global food production that has allowed many of the food traditions of the Northeast slip away over time. One of the major factors that contributed to the slow and steady demise of many heritage varieties is consumer demand; consumers wanted foods that were convenient, shelf stable, and unfettered by seasons. (Does anyone really know when Cool Whip® is in season?) However, consumer demand can also play a central role in reviving some of the terroir in our food system.

A member of RAFT, and active in the Northeast, is the Chef’s Collaborative. Working with local farmers and local restaurants, the Chef’s Collaborative is building a consumer market for heirloom varieties that are native to the Northeast. Last winter/early spring, the Chef’s Collaborative launched Grow-Out, a new program that gives traditional seeds to farmers and connects chefs to these farmers so they can showcase heirloom varieties on their menus. The goal of the program is to increase markets, promote biodiversity, and create community and connections between farmers and chefs. In the first year of Grow-Out, 16 heirloom vegetables were cultivated by 29 farms during the spring and summer. These traditional foods then found their way into 38 restaurants in the region over the summer and fall.

Farmers as well as consumers benefit from the local cultivation of traditional foods. Anne Obelnicki, the Grow-Out project manager, describes some of the benefits farmers receive by growing traditional regional varieties, “Farmer’s are differentiating themselves from other farmers though these products.” She says, “They are differentiating themselves from industrial produced food as well as organic industrial grown foods.”

The 16 vegetables featured in the Grow-Out are only a fraction of the crops that have been identified as threatened, endangered, or functionally extinct by RAFT. In addition to vegetables, the RAFT list includes fruit, seafood, livestock, and wild edibles.

Reading through the list I felt like I was meeting the plant breeders, shelling the beans, and tasting the fruit of another time.
Looking at the names of these regional foods one gets a sense of the history, the flavor, or the visual appeal of these foods. Some varieties take both the given name and the surname of their breeder such as the Frederick Clapp or the Dana Hovey pear. Other names are clearly early marketing schemes designed to sell the virtues of a variety such as the “Thousand-to-One” or the “Lazy Housewife” bean, the “Queen of the Market” raspberry, or, quite bluntly, “Beven’s Favorite” apple.

Some names highlight amusing physical qualities such as the “Leather Britches” bean or the “Old White Egg” eggplant. Reading these names made me want to create an apple pie with now functionally extinct (according to RAFT) “Defiance” wheat and “Rambo” apples. I wonder what it would taste like…defiant revolutionaries with machine guns and bandanas?

All joking aside, reviving traditional food varieties is important to those of us interested in nutrition because it arms us with more healthy ammunition to fight obesity. Just as food companies have learned that consumer’s pallets differ, so nutritionists should recognize that more fruits and vegetables grown for a specific region can increase and prolong the availability of fresh food and provide new tastes and textures that will appeal to a wider audience of people. If nutritionists continue to use bland chicken breasts and watery, tasteless tomatoes to coax people into a healthier diet, the battle is lost.

Although we at nutrition school love our fruits and vegetables, the real keystone to food production in the Northeast is grazing or pastures raised livestock. Dr. John Carroll, Ph.D, a professor of environmental conservation at the University of New Hampshire, emphasized the importance of grazing to the Northeast at a Friedman School Wednesday Seminar in September.

“Grazing is the key to food security in this region. A wide variety of animals can be produced by grazing…not simply liquid milk,” he stated. “We should be making it into cheese, meat, and so forth as our forbearers did as a way of preserving [milk]. Grazing soils are a unique aspect of the region.” At one point, pasture raised animals were a cornerstone to food security in the Northeast. Since then most traces of grazing have disappeared, except maybe a dilapidated stone wall marking an old field; cutting through a deciduous forest.

Rebuilding a regional food system rich in the traditions and biological diversity that once thrived in the Northeast is important to good nutrition and the natural environment. This region will never again be as self-sufficient as it was during its colonial grazing days. Nor should it be, with the growth of the population in the Northeast the land base cannot fully support an adequate diet for all the residents. However, bringing some of the history, taste, and biodiversity back to our food would please the gourmand, the environmentalist, and the nutritionist in me. With that in mind, I urge you to incorporate one or two regional varieties into your holiday meals this season. I know I will be dreaming of my “Defiance Rambo Pie.”

(For a complete list of the foods in the Northeast identified by RAFT please go to: )

This article was orginaly published in the December issue of "The Friedman Sprout."

Transportation

Have you seen that Volkswagen ad where two neighbors are out preening their cars and taking the opportunity to compare their automobile purchases? One neighbor, a talking 1960’s era black Volkswagen Beetle named “Max”, is next to his 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI. The other neighbor, a nameless, pudgy, white, male, is washing his Toyota Prius. After sharing that his Jetta TDI gets 58 mpg, Max starts illustrating how powerful his car is by making dramatic “VmmmVMMMvmmm” noises as if he were a racecar speeding along a winding mountain road. Then Max pauses and innocently asks in a German accent, “What’s your hybrid sound like?” The neighbor puckers his lips into an o-shape and loudly exhales, “Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” Max sarcastically retorts, “Dat’s kool,” even though an airy exhale is clearly anything but a cool noise for a car to make.

I thought about this a lot this summer as a rode my bike to work and inhaled lots of noxious fumes from the trucks in Berkeley, west Oakland, and Emeryville. Is it so bad that your car is quiet? I realize that diesel engines are quite fuel-efficient. But do we really need all the noise pollution that comes with a combustion engine? Although funny, this ad paves a difficult road for any real transportation innovation in the United States.

How would you feel in a city where the traffic made no noise? It would be so much more peaceful. You could sit in a park in Los Angeles and not hear the drone of a freeway zooming by. Real estate values on busy streets would creep up as the toxic fumes and the clamor of 18-wheeler trucks died down.

My wheels really started turning after I read a blog post by Matthew Holtry on Triple Pundit. The post announced the first all-electric commercial vehicle fleet, manufactured by Smith, is in the U.S. As I admired the photos of cute, brightly-painted delivery trucks, I thought, "This could be it." Unfortunately, it appears that all electric fleets, even with their advantages, have yet to woo many corporate executives. The emasculating Volkswagen ad could be contributing to the fact that Smith has yet to break into the U.S. auto market in any real capacity. Smith’s website boasts about a number of European companies who bought Smith fleets, but U.S. company logos are clearly absent from the site. (My guess is that this has something to do with the high price of gas in Europe as compared to the U.S.)

I wanted to blog about this because of the huge implications non-emitting vehicles could have on the food system. Consider all those miles and miles strawberries travel from southern California to reach Boston in December, or the fact that crisp apples must go through nine states (plus the District of Columbia) to make appearances in Florida. The current food system supplies Americans with year-round variety, quality, and quantity of food that was unimaginable prior to the development of interstate highways. But it comes at an environmental cost. Unfortunately, due to they way the highway system and trucking system were developed c system supplies Americans comes at an environmental cost. Now consider that food could be transported silently and without emitting into the air. Granted, Smith’s electric trucks are more of a prototype as the cost is still to high to convert entire fleets, but it's a start.

I uncovered a cache of information on the food system at the Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute webpage. Quite a bit of research on greenhouse gas emissions and the food system exists on the U.C. Davis site. Unfortunately, it seems every researcher calculates greenhouse gas pollution linked to the transportation of food differently. That’s because calculating the emissions of the food system uncovers a complicated web of variables that can change depending on the focus of the study. For example, are you comparing a conventional farm to an organic farm or an average of all farms? What size farms are you examining? And what about the purchasing end? Are you purchasing from a small, local farmer’s market a few times a week or driving further to a big-box store and loading up on provisions?

However, I have confidence that creating a model to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system is possible. If researchers are able to put numbers on much more complex problems like how much CO2 the U.S. emits as a nation, then the amount the food system emits is definitely within the realm of possibility. I think we have not explored the environmental cost of our food because we’re scared. According to one whitepaper published by U.C. Davis, 29% of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions are from food production and transportation. Let’s be honest, “Dat’s not kool.”

Of interest in the news . . .

Here are some interesting discussions, articles, and events happening around food this month:

"So Much Food. So Much Hunger" This New York Times article by Andrew Martin on September 19, 2009 discusses the complexity of world hunger in a concise and digestible manner.

September is National Food Desert Month. Links from this site will bring you to a new government report on Food Deserts which found that 23.2 million Americans live in a food desert. Mari Gallagher established the site and also has an article on The Huffington Post about food deserts.

USDA also announced last week its new campaign titled "Know Your Farmer. Know Your Food." Check out what Secretary Vilsack has to say about the new program on USDA's You Tube site: http://www.youtube.com/usda . In this month's Gourmet Magazine, Barry Estabrook calls the program a joke and implores on the Obama Administration to do more than implement the 2008 Farm Bill passed under the Bush Administration. (It should be noted that the 2008 Farm Bill was vetoed by President Bush and Congress over rode the veto.) I disagree and point to a new blog a friend showed me titled "Obama Foodorama" as proof of all the great work the Administration is doing!

What's the Deal with Fair Trade?

When I was an undergraduate, the cafeteria boasted about its fair trade certified coffee. Little did dinning services know, but those of us who knew good coffee thought it tasted horrible. In my juvenile, cynical way I joked that it was the "teas and sweat" that made the regular coffee taste better. But really, what is fair trade and why do roasters boast about it and expect consumers to pay a premium? What are you paying for?

As it turns out you’re paying for a lot. With products certified by the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (F.L.O. (Don’t ask. I didn’t come up with this acronym.)) You are ensuring that the producers (a.k.a. farmers) are paid a set minimum price which is higher than the global price. For example, the global price of green coffee might be $1 per pound. If the producer is a part of a Fair Trade certified cooperative of growers, that producer receives $1.25 per pound of green coffee and if they are certified organic and fair trade certified they receive $1.75.*

The following fair trade principles are from the TransFair U.S.A. website which is full of interesting information:

• Fair price: Democratically organized farmer groups receive a guaranteed minimum floor price and an additional premium for certified organic products. Farmer organizations are also eligible for pre-harvest credit.
• Fair labor conditions: Workers on Fair Trade farms enjoy freedom of association, safe working conditions, and living wages. Forced child labor is strictly prohibited.
• Direct trade: With Fair Trade, importers purchase from Fair Trade producer groups as directly as possible, eliminating unnecessary middlemen and empowering farmers to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global marketplace.
• Democratic and transparent organizations: Fair Trade farmers and farm workers decide democratically how to invest Fair Trade revenues.
• Community development: Fair Trade farmers and farm workers invest Fair Trade premiums in social and business development projects like scholarship programs, quality improvement trainings, and organic certification.
• Environmental sustainability: Harmful agrochemicals and G.M.O.s are strictly prohibited in favor of environmentally sustainable farming methods that protect farmers’ health and preserve valuable ecosystems for future generations.

TransFair U.S.A. certifies products entering the United States and at this time only certifies: tea, wine, sugar, sports balls, spices & herbs, rice, honey, juices, fresh fruit, flowers, cotton, coffee, bananas, and cocoa. Other items such as crafts are certified through the Fair Trade Federation (F.T.F.) which follows the same sort of principles as the TransFair USA certification.

I think it is important to note that fair trade and organic are not the same. Although similar in that they limit the use of pesticides & insecticides and genetically modified organisms (G.M.O.s) organic certification is a whole separate process which requires additional fees, inspections, and audits. I know that the cost of certification for all of these different programs is an issue for small producers in the developing world trying to differentiate their products in the global market place. Considering that each country has its own certification process, standards, and fees, it’s no wonder many producers are not yet certified.

This is really just the tip of the fair trade iceberg, but understanding the principles behind fair trade is important when paying a premium in a recession. I hope this help!


*These figures are completely made-up and not based on a market data or percentage increase over market price.

What Happened to Home Ec?

What happened to that class where you learned how to balance a check book, bake bread, sew napkins, grow & can beans, cook a nutritionally balanced meal, and iron a shirt? Sure, some of those skills are out-dated (i.e. balance your check book) but curriculum's can be adjusted to accommodate new technology (enter Mint.com stage left).

Concern is growing over the obesity epidemic in the United States as the society starts to experience the real cost of obesity in dollars, productivity, and most importantly quality of life. Policy makers are grabbing at straws for ways to quell the tide of clogged arteries & type II diabetes with regulations & taxes such as calorie labeling on menus and taxing soda. I don't blame policy makers for trying, but if someone doesn't understand that an 800 calorie lunch blows half your recommended daily calorie budget, what does the regulation really accomplish.

We need to educate our young people. Boys & girls should take a revamped 'Home Economics' class where they learn the tools to live within their financial means as well as how to lead a healthy life. Teach the youth about nutrition but also equip them with the skills to select & prepare food that supports good nutritional health. People need the tools & skills to make informed decisions about food & finances.

Don't get me wrong, regulations have their place, but you can't put the cart before the horse!

My rant is in response to a article in the Washington Post on July 15, 2009 by Ezra Kline titled "Change, Calories, Cost."

"Food Inc." Director on the Daily Show

On July 2nd, the Daily Show interviewed Robert Kenner, the director of the new film "Food Inc." Even though the brunt of the interview is about the food system and government subsides for corn & soy, John Stewart manages to put it all into context by bring to light some of the larger social issues our society faces. (In a funny way of course!) See for yourself:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Robert Kenner
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran